Item description: Newspaper article, “Any Cotton Among us Belonging to Traitors!,” as re-published in the 19 July 1862 issue of the Wilmington Daily Journal. The article was originally published in the Atlanta Confederacy newspaper.

Item citation:“Any Cotton Among us Belonging to Traitors!” The Daily Journal (Wilmington, N.C.), 19 July 1862. North Carolina Collection call number: C071 Z. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Item transcription:

Any Cotton Among us Belonging to Traitors!

We hear that Col. Forest, at Murfreesboro’, hung a scoundrel whose conduct has long since justified it, and are also told that same individual has recently been through Georgia, having gathered up all the Confederate notes he could in Tennessee, at a low rate, and purchased a large amount of cotton, which is now within this State. We are further told, that numbers of traitors and enemies have come into the interior of the country, from New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, and all other points overrun by the Yankees, bringing all the Confederate notes out of these places, and buying cotton with it — at the same time being lionized among us as refugees, driven out from their homes. Now we ask all our people to be careful not to sell their cotton to enemies in disguise. It will be necessary to use great caution, lest suspicion unjustly fall upon friends, who are true to us, and have been run out by the Lincolnites. But there is a way of testing every man’s fidelity to the South. Let this test be applied, let every man be properly indorsed, before selling cotton to any one from the enemy’s lines; and let the authorities, the railroad agents, and the people, see to it, that no man is permitted to remove cotton, till it can be satisfactorily shown that all is right. — Atlanta Confederacy.